It’s because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It’s at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him.
Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he’s a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).
I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don’t feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic.
Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.
my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is
there’s also this at the top of the thread:
I’ve been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don’t care enough to have an opinion.
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It’s accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like “Tweet” into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.
turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent
musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed
remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads
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I trawled through some comments and found this amazing titbit
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36853002
You probably can’t pick obscenity in the US but otherwise anything goes. (Semantically/phonetically at least - orthography is a bit more limited.)
That most European countries have a whitelist of names was one of the more shocking parts of moving here.
I mean, it’s a deep cut. For most septics, the fact you can’t buy a gun at the local walmart analog in Europe, or that the state provides health insurance via mandatory deductions from your salary are the shocking parts. Imagine moving to Europe, conceiving a child, then getting mad you can’t call it Hitler or something.
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OK, I’m in Sweden, and to be scrupulously fair we’ve had that issue too. Our kid wanted to change their name to “Winter” and was only able to because another couple had successfully appealed a rejection for that name from the authority in charge.
I’m open to “protecting” kids from getting offensive names while they cannot consent to it, but if you get to the age where you can drive a moped you should be able to change it to something more “out there”. Compromise!
musk fans trying hard to lay the groundwork for the claim that his kids’ names aren’t awful, they’re an expression of red hot wet American freedom and we wouldn’t understand because we have terminal communism
Some nerd said (I’m paraphrasing)
“apparently looking for male hair growth supplements puts you in the list for dick pill advertisers”
turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent
this is the part that needs to be recognised as the brand. Changing the name and the logo are kind of good at this point because the blue bird was already dead. Even before musk that cute bird was doing a lot of work to make shitty people seem not-shitty. Musk can’t hide his shittyness behind a blue bird like jack could. Musk is a skid mark but his lack of creativity makes him use his skid marks as logos - which is something that I hope more shit stains copy because its scary how easy it is to mask a bad smell with a pastel colour palette and a pixel-perfect design system
Even before musk that cute bird was doing a lot of work to make shitty people seem not-shitty.
I’ve always wondered why a lot of the leftists in my life had twitter accounts when the site itself was clearly hostile to them at best, and I think you’ve nailed it
now all I can think about is old.reddit’s stupid fucking “come for the cats, stay for the empathy” banner with the Reddit alien mascot doing cartoony shit, and how many hate subs and instances of real-world violence that kind of branding covered for
I don’t mean to spam, but you miiiiight like my writing :) https://fasterandworse.com/the-aura-of-care/
this looks good! gonna read through it while sleepily hacking on some lemmy code
let me know what you think! Trying to work on the follow up but there are so many threads to follow
I finally read the article without any software breaking and needing to be fixed right away (am I cursed?)
it’s good! I really like the point that tools like notion and slack really just do generic collaboration, a feature set that sells to corporations but is pretty much hell to actually use and encapsulates the worst bits of work (always being on-call in some way, all work being open to drive-by comments from folks who aren’t involved in what’s going on, drawn-out processes being universally normalized), cloaked in a frictionless UI to hide how little value the tools actually bring to the table beyond checking the boxes executives tend to think will increase revenue
this is the kind of writing I’d like to do myself sometime soon when work takes a break from draining my writing skills into an uncountable number of collaborative documents. there’s an essay (probably) named Against Technofascism I’ve been mentally outlining for months now, which sometimes threatens to possess my hands and commit itself to an editor buffer in one night of deeply pissed-off typing
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. This one is the result of spending almost a whole month in a much bigger one and finally realising I wasn’t going to get anything done if I didn’t break it into smaller chunks. I hope you can get your one out!
thank you! that’s a great strategy — maybe we should start a writing community here for short drafts and feedback? ironically I can’t think of a good name for it though
Was just rereading Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit and this jumped out as being relevant.
(As a fly on the wall, I’m sorry you had to experience this side of HN. There are better threads. Keep remembering that.)
it’s kind of heartbreaking when you run into an orange site poster whose soul hasn’t died yet
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it’s very important to musk fans’ world view that privilege doesn’t exist; that being as rich as musk is an achievable goal that was won through sheer engineering effort and not a massive head start, inability to permanently fail, and gigantic amount of luck. the real musk is incredibly far from an engineer in anything but the title he gave himself, of course, but that’s incidental to the fantasy
if you’d like to see what musk looks like without the mythology and associated weird hangers-on, check out the rest of his family: the father who married and impregnated his own stepdaughter, the sister who throws her family’s money into running a failed streaming service, and others I’ve forgotten because they’re just rich assholes failing to no consequence
The absolute most generous you can be is that he benefitted more from the dot-com bubble than anything, and selling out his zip2 company at a probably very overpriced $300M (in 1999 dollars). That still condemns him as a hype-train ponzi circus master who got lucky.
Also lol copium quote for the funding of zip2 from Elon himself:
“My Dad provided 10% of a ~$200k angel funding round much later, but by then risk was reduced & round would’ve happened anyway.”
could you imagine accepting $20k from your parents for, like, anything at all? for most people that’s the kind of money where the idea of fucking up and losing it is nightmare-inducing and would almost certainly have awful repercussions for both you personally and your family. not for these rich assholes though — there was always more money if that $20k went down the drain
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The dot com bubble and it’s consequences…
Didn’t musk literally tell a reporter a “cute” story about trying to secretly sell his dad’s emeralds to Tiffany’s in New York when he was a kid? Either he was lying then or he’s lying now and either way he’s pathetic
Musk could take an X right in these zealots’ mouths and they’d love it
For my sinsbecause it’s fun to program, I have a site that compares links posted to lobste.rs and HN. As part of that I’ve scraped almost all of HN submissions since 2012.The posts where Musk’s bid for Twitter are discussed are among the top 10 for most comments ever.
- “Twitter set to accept Musk’s $43B offer – sources” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153277 - 2.5k score, 3.8k comments
- “Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061 - 2.7k score, 3.1k comments
The second one has this top comment by 'dang: “All: speech here isn’t very free when the server can’t stay up, and it’s smoking right now, for obvious reasons. […] Edit: also, if some of you would log out for the day, that would ease the load considerably. (I hate to ask that, but it’s true. Make sure you haven’t lost your password!)”
A more patient person than me will have to sift through that garbage to try to gauge HackerNews’ sentiment then vs. now.
Link to stats: https://gerikson.com/hnlo/topscore.html. No accuracy is implied nor guaranteed.
Service itself: https://gerikson.com/hnlo/
dang: “All: speech here isn’t very free when the server can’t stay up, and it’s smoking right now, for obvious reasons. […] Edit: also, if some of you would log out for the day, that would ease the load considerably.
the incredible power of paul graham’s Lisp mastery
in general, how do you feel like lobste.rs and the orange site compare? the one time I gave lobsters a fair shake it felt like HN but more so, but that might have just been a bad day for the site. looking at your top score list (great work by the way), it looks like lobsters might attract a slightly more technical crowd? but the orange site is largely marketing folks and middle managers masquerading as engineers, so the bar isn’t too high
We can actively chase cryptofascists off of Lobsters, which is nice. We can also mock and fisk them, and usually the moderators allow it. In that sense, it isn’t a literal Nazi bar like HN. Otherwise, yeah, the topics and attitudes are mostly the same.
I did some looking around lobsters.
From a front page post:
Where do you discuss computer related stuff now?
top comment:
(I unironically suggest 4chan’s /g/ or lainchan, because then at least there is no pretense of quality.)
Same poster goes on regular multiparagraph culture war rants to the point that the other users refer to them by name.
It seems like more of the same BS. Angry nerds waxing poetically about shit that doesn’t matter.
HN and Lobste.rs differ only in degree. It’s basically the same audience, but the mods on lobste.rs have a different focus.
As soon as I saw that submission I knew someone would recpmmend 4chan, and it wasn’t surprisnig it was that user. After a while you learn who the idiots are and either avoid interacting with them or ignore them. Overt racism, misogyny and homophobia usually get forceful pushback.
Is it really a missing stair if the guy is consistently highly upvoted. The 4chan recommendation is top comment as of right now.
How many upvotes are for “4chan is good actually” (pushed back against in the comments) and how much is it for spleen against mainstream social media, which face it, is upvote bait in the fediverse too?
I don’t know, but I suspect it’s a mix, with a majority a pining for the good old days of Real Forums and Usenet.
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that’s what that’s called? that’s an incredibly useful term to keep in mind
I don’t accept this characterization. When I say “ignore”, I mean I don’t reply to their comments, or upvote their submissions. (lobste.rs does not have downvotes, but it has flags. I use those when appropriate).
The important thing for me is that lobste.rs is not a welcoming place for people who promote racism, sexism, homophobia, cryptocurrency, or the worst parts of the California ideology. Do these people exist on the site? Yes, and I know who they are, and I keep an eye on them. Do their comments about these things get massively upvoted? No. Are they banned if they persist? Yes.
If this changes in a meaningful way, I’m out.
That actually sounds pretty good, how do people get invited these days?
They get an invite from someone who has been a member for more than 70 days 😉
The invite tree is public and many people (me among them) require a minimum of vetting (code forge account, social media presence) before extending one. PM me with details!
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I don’t accept that a few users advocating for using 4chan are actually dangerous, at the level of the community member that inspired the coinage. That’s all.
If y’all find participating in such a community distasteful, that’s fine. I find it acceptable, but I’m in no way proselyting for it.
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Lobste.rs is where I spend most of my time online…
The focus is much more on the technical side. Submissions have to be tagged by a pre-approved set of tags (pre-censorship!) and users can flag a submission as spam or off-topic. https://lobste.rs/tags
Membership is invite-only, which does tend to enforce echo chambers, but at least prevents drive-by spamming, and does keep track of who invites who: https://lobste.rs/u#gerikson
Moderation is transparent: https://lobste.rs/moderations
It’s a much smaller community, and I believe the mods are quite active “behind the scenes” in putting out fires. FWIW I’ve read that dang works fulltime moderating HN but it’s a thankless job.
If you enjoy discussing programming and IT, lobste.rs is great. It’s also quite welcoming towards LGBT+ folks, although there’s a vocal contingent who are opposed to “SJWs”. Here’s a representative example thread, with an on topic submission from a user who happens to be an outspoken furry: https://lobste.rs/s/mn1am1. The usernames with strike-throughs are no longer active, generally they have been banned (the ban reason can be seen by clicking on the username).
Edit to add
- to deal with the flood of cryptocurrency-related topics, and how the submitters where always whining “it’s about the tech” the tag
cryptocurrencieswas renamed tomerkle-trees. - personal productivity, business news, and similar are explicitly off topic.
- there’s low tolerance for treating the site as a last-ditch customer support venue
- to deal with the flood of cryptocurrency-related topics, and how the submitters where always whining “it’s about the tech” the tag
